


Clockwork's Stories

by Sigilmancy



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2020-12-24 03:01:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21092312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sigilmancy/pseuds/Sigilmancy
Summary: Stories about a ratfolk sorcerer





	1. Sinister Surveillance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for the October Megaprompt Contest on Subeta, prompt Sinister Surveillance

Why she had been chosen, chances were she would never know. Wrong place, wrong time maybe. Or maybe she'd attracted attention to herself in another way, and that was what had led her to be following the two legs now. They had names, of course, but most of her kin referred to them simply as two legs amongst themselves or Master when they were around. Tall creatures that walked on two legs, their arms dangling at their sides, and faces that were shaped like humans but had a mass of tentacles for mouths. They ruled the ratfolk in the underground, seeing the race as little more than slaves. Unintelligent slaves, but their lack of intellect was what made them perfect to control and to tackle other jobs that some people just plain wouldn't touch.

So Clockwork followed, shuffling on all fours after the two legs as it led her through the throng of other ratfolk and eventually up to where the rest of its kind watched over them. She didn't know why it wanted her, or what it intended to do, but there were plenty of others who saw her and looked with sad eyes; they didn't expect she would return. If she did she would be marked, changed, and outcast as the others suspected her of being an agent of the two legs set amongst them to spy and ensure compliance with orders regardless of the fact such a thing had never happened as far as any of them knew. Fear did a great job of keeping them all in line, after all, and perhaps this was just one more fear tactic their masters were using to keep their power.

Either way, eventually their path diverged from the main roads of the ratfolk city and led up. Up and up, to the higher parts of the cave, and into a large chamber. There more two legs awaited, chattering amongst themselves in their strange tongue that the ratfolk could not understand. One pointed at her, and after that her mind was blank.

Clockwork woke with pain throbbing through her head, a groan echoing out into the otherwise still air. It took her eyes a moment to adjust after she opened them, realizing it was still dark but her natural darkvision granted her sight. Grave markers stood all around her, ancient and crumbling, but she didn't recognize them or her current location.

After what seemed like an eternity she pulled herself up, feeling a deep ache in all of her bones and an unfamiliar sense of dizziness as her head seemed like it was about to explode. Among the graves were bodies; humanoid, and the closer Clockwork looked the more she realized at least some of them looked partially like the two legs, their faces twisted expressions of agony as they physically sat somewhere between what they had been and what they were becoming and had clearly died or been killed before the transformation was complete.

"A graveyard." Clockwork murmured to herself. Not just of ancient gravestones but of more recent death, a dumping ground for those bodies the two legs did not want to deal with. Where she had been tossed out too, assumed dead...

The thought made her panic, standing up quickly and ignoring the pain as she twisted to check herself over only to breathe a sigh of relief when there was no sign that she held any of the physical changes the half-transformed bodies had. Then she had to sit down again, holding her head and trying to get the pain to stop. When it finally subsided she got up slowly, picking her way among the graves and trying not to step on any of them in the enormous chamber that seemed to stretch on forever, even beyond the edges of her darkvision.

Eventually the cave gave way to a tunnel, and she followed it. Going forward was better than going back, if the two legs had left her for dead then returning to her kin was not an option. If they found her body missing, or otherwise realized she lived, they would come after her. Escape was all that mattered now, and Clockwork ignored anything else except putting one foot in front of the other in order to get as far away as possible. There were other creatures in the underground, and the thought was if she could make it to them she could seek shelter, perhaps, or get some help. If they knew what she was maybe they wouldn't help her for fear of angering the two legs, but it was worth trying.

Hours and hours later the tunnel led to a place she didn't expect; outside. There had been some unusual smells, and the feeling of the air flowing around her body, but Clockwork had thought perhaps she was approaching another cavern and the dim light at the end of it was like the lantern lights back home. Instead she was greeted with a vast expanse of the world ahead of her, looking down on it from the slope of a mountain. Clockwork knew of the world outside the underground, of course, because some of her kin were lucky enough to get to go there with the two legs and came back with fantastic tales of a place with no roof where orbs of light moved above to tell the people there when to be awake and when to sleep.

Still motivated by fear of the two legs, now realizing they could follow her even in this new place, Clockwork kept on. Below lay plants the color of blood as she had never seen before, tall things of black stone with red patches, some of which had fallen to the ground. She didn't dare touch them, she just wound her way through, pushing on until light began to erupt on the far horizon. Soon it was too bright for her sensitive eyes to keep seeing and she had to touch one of the plant structures, finding a hole in one that was just big enough for her to squeeze into and then down to the long abandoned home some other creature had made beneath its roots where it was dark and quiet but also open in a way that allowed her to see how light it was and know when it would be dark enough to travel.

All the while, inside her head, the parasite saw through her eyes. It could not control her as it had originally intended to do, or force upon her the shift into what it should have become, but it could watch. It could communicate with the hive mind connecting all of its kind, and had told them what was going on ever since Clockwork had first awoken. It was not luck that they did not chase her, it was curiosity; they had taken the gamble in trying to convert her and assumed failure, but she had survived and still had the parasite attached to her brain. What that might do to her, both short term and long term, as well as what actions she would take were worth studying as long as the parasite kept them informed. An entire species was watching her, studying her, and Clockwork drifted off to sleep with no idea about any of it.


	2. Mindless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Done for NaNoWriMo 2019

Mindless, to act without justification or concern for the consequences. A simple, repetitive task that can be performed without skill. Was that what she had been, all her life? A mindless servant? Clockwork had to think so, now that she found herself with a wealth of new information at her disposal.

After a night spent running, the little ratfolk had woken in the tree's hollow with the first rays of the sun and squinted at the bright light. It hurt her eyes, and almost seemed to burn her skin where it was exposed along her feet and tail as she crawled out into the forest above. Somehow in the process of sleeping she had found herself knowing things that were previously foreign concepts and ideals to her.

She thought about her life up to that point. Having been born into a colony of her own kin, but enslaved to the two legs....No, illithids. That was the word in her mind when she thought about them now, and with it came another rush of information. What they had done to her, she thought, was to try to make them one of their own. Implanting a tadpole into her mind with the hopes it would eat her brain and transform her into an illithid. The process, however, had clearly failed since she had been discarded in the graveyard and still lived, managing to escape their clutches for now.

"But how do I know all of this...." Clockwork questioned aloud to no one in particular, focused on putting one foot in front of the other in order to keep putting as much distance between herself and the mountain as possible.

Maybe, just maybe, the tadpole had managed to pass on its information before it died. Her mind just took time to process that, because she was so focused on what had been going on. Yes, yes that made sense. And now that her mind was beginning to process the information there was so much more there than she could have ever imagined. A beautiful new power set laid out before her, magic settling into her very bones that just begged to be used.

"But I will need a focus....something with magic...." She murmured to herself, continuing to scuttle off through the sea of trees. To get a spellcasting focus she would need to interact with society, which was going to be hard. Clockwork imagined that much of society had not seen many like her, if any at all. But maybe she was wrong, maybe the world above was full of her kin too and she would be able to find some acceptance among them. There was really no way to know until she reached a populated town, but even then she would have to be careful. If they were not familiar with her kind it might come as a shock to see what was essentially an oversized rat that could speak among them. There could be danger, and for the moment Clockwork had no way to defend herself.

"I am no longer mindless, and I am no longer simple. I will figure this out, one way or another." Again her voice echoed alone in the otherwise silent area, but she didn't mind. Clockwork liked the sound, it was new and exciting as she imagined many things were going to be soon enough. So she walked on, ignoring the sensitivity to the daylight and knowing that the illithids would not follow her in the light because they liked it even less than she did. She was small and could find places to hide come the night when she needed to rest, so with that in mind Clockwork kept herself going towards whatever life was now laid out before her.


End file.
